However:
- I can't find any planned release date for Hibernate 5 anywhere, presumably because there isn't one yet.
- In the "Hibernate 5 - When" thread just below, it was posted that Hibernate 5 will be released in "2014 or 2015".

Yet Manning is still providing an estimated release date of March 2014 for the physical book. That seems pretty unlikely, given that the book will still need to be updated in many places once Hibernate 5 is released.

I appreciate that the release date of Hibernate 5 is completely beyond the control of Manning, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect them to provide good faith updates for the release date of this book. My apologies if I am misunderstanding the situation, but as things stand this book might not even be published until 2015, right?

Well the authors obviously don't want to answer this thread, which I find disappointing. I raised the same issue directly with Manning and they would not respond either.

I am happy to be corrected on any errors on my part, but this is the situation as I understand it on the publication of this book:
- The book is about Java persistence with Hibernate 5.
- I see no release date for Hibernate 5, and in an earlier thread the author acknowledged that Hibernate 5 may not even be released in 2014.
- The status of the book is somewhat misleading (17 of 19 chapters available) since the code examples rely on Hibernate 5 which is not available.
- Therefore, even the instructions and code for a trivial "Hello World" example in chapter 1 cannot be provided.
- Manning continue to publish an estimated release date of March 2014, when there is a real possibility that the book won't be published before next year. Manning should update that estimated release date.

I like Manning books, and I buy MEAP books. I'm sure that this one may be a great book eventually, but it is just too bleeding edge to be useful at the moment IMO.

> - I see no release date for Hibernate 5, and in an
> earlier thread the author acknowledged that Hibernate
> 5 may not even be released in 2014.

Or 2015 or 2016. It's done when it's done. Nobody knows when exactly that will be.

> - The status of the book is somewhat misleading (17
> of 19 chapters available) since the code examples
> rely on Hibernate 5 which is not available.

This is not correct. If you actually download the code examples (http://jpwh.org/) you will see that they are tested on Hibernate 4.3. The code will be updated for the latest available Hibernate version continuously and we'll also update the text. In other words, you are now getting a Hibernate 4.3 book with free updates until 5.0 is ready.

> - Therefore, even the instructions and code for a
> trivial "Hello World" example in chapter 1 cannot be
> provided.

That is correct. There are plans to rewrite the bootstrap/configuration API for Hibernate 5. This change would make the "bootstrap" section obsolete and instead of rewriting it continuously, we just postpone this rather trivial example. If you really need a Hello World, the same chapter of the previous edition is a free download.

> - Manning continue to publish an estimated release
> date of March 2014, when there is a real possibility
> that the book won't be published before next year.
> Manning should update that estimated release date.

Thanks for your helpful response and clarifications. With hindsight I guess I should have done my own research on the status of Hibernate 5 rather than relying on Manning's estimated release date of the book.

But based on your comments, perhaps the book's description from Manning could be modified to stress that although the book covers Hibernate 5, it is primarily about using JPA 2.1 with Hibernate. Therefore any version of Hibernate compatible with JPA 2.1 (i.e. Release 4.3 or later) should work fine.

That would make the unknown release date of Hibernate 5 (possibly 2016?!) much less of an issue.